The Trudeau government announced than Canada would welcome 500,000 immigrants a year by 2025. This is almost twice as many as before the Liberals came to power in Ottawa. And that’s 50,000 more than the last target, set last year. And that’s not counting the half-million so-called temporary workers, who often occupy permanent positions, and foreign students who arrive on Canadian soil.
Canada is no longer just “the best country in the world”, but the one which, of all the countries on the planet, welcomes the most newcomers in proportion to its population. As if there were immigration Olympics and Justin Trudeau wanted to win the gold medal.
Indeed, the Trudeau government swallowed the theses of the Century Initiative, a lobby that has been campaigning for several years for the Canadian population to increase to 100 million people by 2100 – a nice round number, all the same. Massive immigration is a guarantee of prosperity; it will put an end to labor shortages and counter the aging of the population. The simple fact of being more numerous makes richer, one can summarize.
However, this strategy, which stems from ideology, does not stand up to the test of facts.
There is no relationship between the size of a country’s population and its wealth. At most, and this is mathematical, when the population increases, the size of the economy increases. But that does not mean that per capita wealth is increasing. As the economist Pierre Fortin has clearly demonstrated, based on numerous studies, there is no proof that an accelerated expansion of immigration and population would influence one way or the other on the standard of living of Canadians.
It’s true that immigration can help a particular business address the labor shortage it’s facing. But the arrival of immigrants, permanent or temporary, increases the demand for labor in general.
Quebec is one of the provinces where the aging of the population is the most pronounced. But it is not the only one to lack manpower. Ontario, which takes in all proportions more immigrants than Quebec, is affected by the scarcity of labour, which Premier Doug Ford complains about. And it is in British Columbia, whose immigration threshold is proportionally higher than that of Quebec, that the job vacancy rate is the highest.
Offhand, the Trudeau government is asking officials at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to do more, when they are overwhelmed and the service has become dysfunctional in many ways. One can also wonder where these newcomers will take their penates while, already, the country is sorely lacking in affordable housing.
The Trudeau government continues to increase the pace even if it does not manage to achieve its objective that 4.4% of immigrants outside Quebec be Francophones, a target that is in any case not sufficient given a rate amazing assimilation.
In just a year and a half, Canada will welcome as many immigrants outside Quebec who will speak or adopt English as there are Canadians who speak mainly French at home, ie a little less than 600,000 people. In New Brunswick, the future of Acadians is threatened by immigration that massively favors English, and the Trudeau government is looking elsewhere.
For Quebec, which appears to be a bad sleeper, Justin Trudeau and his henchman Pablo Fernandez have a very simple solution: under the Canada-Quebec agreement on immigration, the Legault government has all the powers necessary to select as many immigrants needed to maintain the demographic weight of Quebecers within the federation, that is, to raise the annual threshold of landed immigrants from 50,000 to 115,000. Thanks for the suggestion, but for realism, we’ll come back.
The Quebec immigration system is jammed. The administrative negligence of the federal government does not help, but it is the situation that has changed: the selection of immigrants now goes through the channel of so-called temporary workers, chosen by companies with the imprimatur of Ottawa, and that of foreign students.
It is a huge challenge that awaits the new Minister of Immigration, Francisation and Integration, Christine Fréchette: that of regaining control of our immigration system, if that is possible in this federation. imperialism that is being built without regard to the Quebec nation.